Elsewhere: A Memoir

After eight commanding works of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize winner Empire Falls, Richard Russo offers this hilarious, moving, and surprising account of his life, his parents—particularly his peripatetic mother, Jean—and the upstate New York town that they all struggled in various ways to escape. Growing up in the leather-tanning town of Gloversville, a close knit community that, by the 1950s, was slipping into poverty and endemic illness, young Rick was instilled with a dream from his mother of a world elsewhere.

"It's rare for a novelist to write candidly about the real behind the imagined. About a lifetime of work and the very person who inspired it. Yet that is precisely what Richard Russo has done in his memoir.... Redemption is always the prize in a Russo story. Nowhere do we see that more clearly than in Elsewhere, a brave little book in which a writer spins deprivation into advantage, suffering into wisdom, and a broken mother into a muse. Wanting him to be anywhere but Gloversville, Jean Russo did everything she could to make her son leave. And then, unable to feel whole anywhere outside it, she eventually brought him home."—Washington Post